Re: Help! Simple questions.
Date: 1996/01/04
Message-ID: <4cfn1h$bp9_at_mandolin.qnet.com>
>>I just begin to learn Oracle. I found it is terribly slow. My PC is
>>Pentium 75, 16 MB RAM. Also I found excessive disk operation. Any thing
>>wrong with the set up.When I login to SQL*Plus, it did say that "Product
>>user profile not loaded, ....disenabling ....." Is this the problem. If
>>yes, tell me how to do it, in detail please; if not, what is the real
>>problem? My HD makes terrible noise every time when I insert a row into a
>>table. Thank you in advance!
>
>
>
{from Ron can't jump: Maybe your problem is not with Oracle!
After I loaded MS Exchange and MS Internet Explorer, I notice Netscape really slowed down and the harddisk was constantly running. I had 11 MBytes free on my harddisk. After reading the below information, I freed memory and now have 27 MBytes free without adjusting any system parameters. The performance improvement was amazing.
Hear are some suggestions from others for Win 95:}
For those with less than 16 meg of RAM:
When I only had 8 megs of RAM I actually found that decreasing Vcache to 1024 completely cut out 'thrashing' though there was some (minimal) performance penalty. Now that I have 16 megs I still have Vcache set at 2048, increasing it from this only seemed to increase thrashing without any performance increase.
BTW. Thanks for the plug to my page Sandy.
s-sanong_at_deepcove.com (Sandy Wong) wrote:
>johns_at_cts.com (John R. Simpson) wrote:
>>Every since I installed Win 95, the ONLY problem I have is constant HD
>>thrashing. When I try and use Explorer, the left window does a sort of
>>"refresh" thingie every 5 seconds. Really strange. I am using the
>>default (let windows handle it) vertual mem settings.
>>Thanks...
>>John in Sunnie Sandy Eggo
>I had the same problem (on a P90 with 32 mg RAM) and got the following
>informative response compliments of:
>Andrew Oakeley - 4th year student in Natural Resource Management |
> | aoakeley_at_ice.agric.uwa.edu.au or jackaroo_at_tartarus.uwa.edu.au |
> | http://www.uwa.edu.au/student/jackaroo/welcome.html
>Yes, contrary to what microsoft will tell you, there is a FAQ on this
>on my home page. It really applies to 8Mb machines - but I have 16 and
>it worked so try it.
>http://www.uwa.edu.au/student/jackaroo/
><CUT>
>1. Virtual memory and disk caching
>Windows 95 handles disk caching and virtual memory much differently
>than previous versions of Windows. In
>both cases, if left at default, Windows 95 dynamically sizes the disk
>caching size and virtual memory according
>to how it sees the system needs it. I think that it sucks up too much
>RAM for the disk caching and that means
>too little left for applications. So some excessive disk activity
>occurs due to applications being swapped out to
>virtual memory to soon and too often. Then in addition to this, there
>is the extra acitvity of the virutal memory
>resizing itself. I have made a VERY noticable improvement on my 8 MB
>system by fixing the virtual memory at
>20 MB and more importantly limiting the size of the disk cache to a
>maximum of 2 MB. To control the size of
>disk caching (despite the implication by Microsoft that you can't) you
>add two lines in the system.ini file in your
>windows 95 directory in the [vcache] section:
> MinFileCache=0
> MaxFileCache=x
> Where x= the max size of disk caching in KB
> In my case x=2048
>Send responses to Andrew.
| Andrew Oakeley - 4th year student in Natural Resource Management | | aoakeley_at_ice.agric.uwa.edu.au or jackaroo_at_tartarus.uwa.edu.au | | http://www.uwa.edu.au/student/jackaroo/welcome.html | |_The knack to flying is to throw yourself at the ground and miss.__|
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From: bps_at_ionet.net (Blake Stover)
Newsgroups: comp.os.ms-windows.win95.misc
Subject: Win 95 in 8megs: Tips & Tricks
Date: Sun, 29 Oct 1995 14:59:20 GMT
Organization: Internet Oklahoma
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<DH1nI5.934_at_eskimo.com>
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future_at_eskimo.com (Tim Gerchmez) wrote:
>On 25 Oct 95 06:11:58 -0700, CPlusPlusPro_at_msn.com (Frank Hartmann)
>wrote:
>>Windows 95 uses a pretty typical paging algorithm. The problem is
>>your lack of physical memory. Win 95 likes 16 Mb best. Get more
>>memory or get used to the thrashing noise.
>Trouble is, it's not only the noise. Disk thrashing slows down the
>system quite a bit while it's happening.
>I went back to Win 3.11 because I can't afford $300 for another 8 meg
>of RAM (and actually I need a bigger hard disk too, so make that
>$500-$600 total).
Ok, here are some tips for running win95 in less memory:
- Lower desktop resolution and/or smaller TILED bitmap instead of large full-screen. The higher the desktop resolution the more memory windows needs to maintain it and refresh it. 640x480x256 takes up to 307k (note that choosing 256 color can actually slow things down if you use a lot of applications that make use of 16 or 32bit color, since windows must constantly alter the color pallete for them.). A full screen bitmap in 1024x768x64k color can take up to 1.6 MEGS of memory to maintain. A happy medium: a TILED 320x200x64k color bitmap will take about about 128k.
- In system.ini [vcache] set MAXFILECACHE=2048 (or lower, depends on how much you need memory as opposed to HD speed).
- Dump any useless background tasks. Run a utility like InfoSpy to tell you what tasks are actually running, get rid of ones you don't use on a frequent basis. Examples: Screen Savers like AfterDark (which can use up to 1mb of memory just SITTING there). Win95 powertools like screen resize, system resource monitor, etc. Especially tools that reside in the system tray. Although each one doesn't use much ram in itself, together they can waste a lot, and they each use a little bit of cpu time.
- Make sure you aren't loading unnecessary devices and tsr's in config.sys or autoexec.bat. especially, NO SMARTDRIVE.
- Get rid of extra objects and icons from the desktop. While on the desktop, each one uses a small amount of ram to maintain it's info. Because the average allocation for them is 1k-3k having 20 objects on the desktop can use 20-60k. A small amount, but a lot of small amounts equal a large amount. #) Put the objects in folders and keep just a few objects on the desktop.
- Check settings in your favorite applications. Especially if you notice that the system seems to slow down or thrash the disk when the app loads. Examples: Netscape has disk and memory cache options, set a smaller memory and larger disk cache. Lviewpro has the option to use temporary files or main memory, so unless you view a lot of jpegs and change the view constantly, set it to use disk instead of memory. Particularly if you keep it open on the desktop, but aren't using it very much.
- Make a small, seperate partition for your swap file out of the last few megs of your hd. (Between 16mb to 127mb since this size gives you the smallest cluster size, ie 2k clusters). (Be sure to make backups before repartitioning your drive). This way your swap file is never fragmented, and can grow or shrink contiguously. Also, if you don't reboot windows often, try setting a larger minimum swap file size so the swap file has to grow less often. Or set the minimum and maximum to the same number to get the equivalent of a permanent swap file. (make sure this number is large enough, or you'll find yourself getting memory errors).
- Be sure you are using your hard drive in its best mode. Particularly with new EIDE drives on an older 486 motherboard. You may need a driver like Ontrack Disk Manager/Drive Rocket to get your drive into its fastest mode. If you have an older IDE drive controller card, consider getting a newer EIDE one since a $50 investment can improve hard drive performance by several HUNDRED percent in this case.
- Use the System Monitor to check out which applications are using quite a bit of the cpu time when idle. Dos apps tend to be bad about this. Avoid leaving these cpu hogs open/running in the background since they can drastically slow the system down even when they aren't doing anything at all.
- Be careful in running dos apps to restrict the memory they can use. Many dos apps, games especially, will use all the memory they can find. If you set them to AUTO they will happily cause your swap file to grow to a gigantic size, and bring the system to its knees.
- If you crash a dos window, particularly if you crash more than one time, you often won't get all of its memory back. The portion that was being used by command.com (or 4dos.com in my case) may remain reserved but unused. Keep this in mind. 4dos will tell me how many copies of itself are in memory, so so if I open a dos window, and it tells me 4 copies are in memory, I may be wasting up to 600k in dead copies of the dos command processor.
- Fonts: Both Win95 and Adobe Type Manager use memory to cache fonts. The larger this font cache size, and the more fonts there are, the more memory you use. If you have a lot of unused fonts, consider getting rid of them. Be sure you don't remove any that you DO use though.
- Unneeded devices/drivers in system.ini or win.ini: Look for DEVICE=full pathname\device.386 These are usually drivers/VXD's that were installed by some program other than win95. You can tell what they are by looking at the pathname to WHERE they are. If it's a program you seldom use, comment out the device line until you actually want to USE that program. If you see a device that is in the windows directory, and you don't use the program at all any more, get rid of that device (example, you have deleted Afterdark, but you are still loading AD.386).
Well, that's a few useful tips. There are plenty more, but these should help.
{Ron can't jump: and}
However, you are correct that you can improve performance by managing it yourself. Most specifically if you set minimum size to larger than you routinely use (there's this wonderful program named SysMon which is available in the custom Win95 install...) there are big gains. I set my minimum such that real RAM plus swapfile is 32 meg. Others recommend 2.5 times real RAM, which is sometimes more and sometimes less than what I use. I figure that if this covers me 99% of the time (which it does), I can afford to deal with some slowness in order to get my work done the other 1%, so I set a functionally infinite maximum; some people prefer to set minimum and maximum the same.
Along with that, a bigger improvement can be done by adding some stuff to [vcache] in system.ini:
MinFileCache=
MaxFileCache=
On these I strongly recommend setting both values the same, as the time-killer is changing the cache size. What value? Take your real memory size in kilobytes, subtract 4096, divide by 4, gives a reasonable first try. (If you're so unfortunate as to have only 4M RAM, then use 256.)
YES YOU CAN do both of these -- strongly recommended in fact!
Good luck, Ron can't jump Received on Thu Jan 04 1996 - 00:00:00 CET